Blind Fury

By Lynda La Plante

A motorway service station on the M1: dimly lit, run down, poorly supervised, flickering lights, dark corners; a favourite stopover for long-distance lorry drivers on their way up north from London. Behind it, a body is found in a ditch, that of a girl barely out of her teens. She appears to have no family, no friends, no connections anywhere. Other girls have gone missing in the vicinity and no one has stepped forward to claim them.

Anna Travis is assigned to the case. Her blood runs cold when she receives a letter from a lifer -- someone she was responsible for arresting in the past -- who writes to her from prison, asking her to visit him urgently. For he claims he knows who the killer is…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Release date: Jun 10, 2010
• ISBN: 9781847379993

Lynda La Plante

Lynda La Plante's many novels, including the Prime Suspect series, have all been international bestsellers. She is an honorary fellow of the British Film Institute and a member of the UK Crime Writers Awards Hall of Fame. She was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in 2008. She runs her own television production company and lives in London and Easthampton, New York. Visit her website at LyndaLaPlante.com.

Reviews for Blind Fury

[Valerie O'Connor · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great read, couldn't leave it down , can't wait for next book

[Linda Tonkn · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Plodding procedural and the main character, Anna Travis doesn't have a personality. I gave up before the end.

[diana.hauser · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

BLIND FURY by Lynda La Plante is Book 6 in her Anna Travis Mysteries series. It is an excellent ‘police procedural’ mystery - full of suspense, character studies, plot twists and turns. It feels as if one is actually working on the case in the incident room. It is that realistic.The ending stunned me. I can’t even process it or write about it yet.The series is highly recommended.

[markpsadler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In this sexually charged thriller Detective Inspector Anna Travis, finds herself leading the investigation of the murders of three women whose bruised and raped bodies had been dumped in a field close to the M1, the major thoroughfare between London and Manchester. All the girls had the same MO and no DNA had been left at the scene.
Carefully piecing together the clues, digging up dirt in places the former investigator missed, Travis has to work carefully not to antagonize the crew she was working with as well as keeping her former lover, and now boss, at arm’s length. The evidence mounts and they run into increasing dead end after dead end until a letter arrives from Cameron Welsh, a prisoner who Travis previously helped put away for sexual homicide. Welsh is kept under close surveillance in a top security wing at Barfield Prison in Leeds.
Welsh claims to have information to help solve the murders. Is this just a bored prisoner looking for sexual kicks of his own or does he really have knowledge on the subject that will help another young lady from meeting a similar fate?
During her trips to Barfield Prison, Travis is subjected to all manners of disgusting tirades from Welsh, who does however, prove to be useful in some of the scenarios he poses, and at the same time Travis falls hard for the young prison guard Ken Hudson. In the process of falling head-over-heels for the guard, she finds evidence which suggests that perhaps he may be involved in the disappearance of the murdered girls.
This tear-away thriller will keep you awake at night, prying your closing eyes open with toothpicks, to get to the next clue. Definitely a rip-roaring, can’t-put-it-down read.

[ecw0647 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Linda LaPlante writes excellent police procedurals in several series. This one features DI Anna Travis whom we saw earlier involved in a ridiculous affair with her boss, Superintendent Langton who continues to have a presence and influence on the investigations. He's also a very bright detective as we see in one scene.

The scenes with Cameron Walsh were a bit too reminiscent of "Silence of the Lambs." Walsh is a killer Travis had jailed years earlier but he's obsessed with her and claims to be able to help with their investigation into the deaths of young foreign workers.

You get a real sense for the plodding tediousness of a difficult investigation with few clues. It's definitely not a thriller but seems to me to be a more accurate depiction of how frustrating and repetitive an investigation can be. I rather liked the repeated interviews, tracking down and interviewing witnesses, the interplay among the characters, and the tedious seeming lack of progress that many other reviewers decried. I'm not so wild about the romantic relationships that Travis finds herself in constantly but which often lend little to the overall plot. An attempt at building up the character, I suppose.

A thriller it's not, but as a realistic portrayal of the frustrations of police investigations, it's top-notch.

[twink_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Yes, I did just review a Lynda LaPlante title recently. (Blood Line - my review) That was my first introduction to the Detective Inspector Anna Travis series. Well, I was in need of an audio book to listen to, so I thought I would download the previous book - Blind Fury.DI Travis is called in when a young woman's body is found in a ditch by a highway service station. With the amount of traffic passing through and by, finding a suspect will be difficult. But when further investigation turns up another young woman killed in the same manner, the team realizes they may have a serial killer on their hands. But what they don't have is any clues. Convicted killer Cameron Walsh insists he has information to share - but he will only talk to Anna - the copper who put him behind bars.The reader was Kim Hicks. Her voice was excellent, providing lots of different voices and accents for various characters. It's always different listening to a book rather than reading. Unless you fast forward, you hear every word. If you're reading, it's possible to skim over some passages. I enjoyed the plotting in Blind Fury crime and the solid investigation by the team. What I did find a bit tiresome was Anna's love life in this book. It was all a bit swoony for me. Now, I will rarely go backwards in a series as I find it frustrating to already know what's going to happen and where the character is going. And in this case, I was right. I knew what the shock was going to be in the final chapters and it did spoil the book a bit for me. So, will I read/listen to another Anna Travis book? Yes, as I really enjoyed Blood Line. But I won't be hunting down any others in the back list.

[missmermaid118 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

oooooo! I had fun with this book! When I received an offer to review Lynda LaPlante's BLIND FURY, I didn't initially jump at the chance. I wasn't familiar with the author's work (or so I thought!) and BLIND FURY is the sixth novel in the Anna Travis series (not a problem at all!). But it is the season for reading thrillers, and I do love British fiction, so . . . First I took a closer look at the author and discovered that she wrote the original Prime Suspect series (famously produced by Granada Television and starring the incomparable Dame Helen Mirran) as well as several other bestsellers. That was enough for me -- I LOVE the Prime Suspect series. It wouldn't be the first time I've plunged into the middle of a series, and I think that if a series novel is really good, it won't matter if you've read the previous titles.As it turns out, BLIND FURY is one of the best thriller/police procedurals I've ever read. The characters are complex and interesting; the suspense is non-stop. But what really ranks it as a cut above the competition, is that I came away a bit more knowledgeable about British history. I generally consider the thriller genre to be a guilty pleasure -- as much as I love to indulge, I don't usually feel intellectually nourished. When I want a mystery with some substance, I turn to the likes of Peter Robinson or James Lee Burke. While LaPlante's book isn't so philosophically loaded, it did shine a light on an aspect of Bristish society and history of which I was unaware; specifically, the immigration of Poles during the period of WWII. (Sychronistically, stories of Polish immigrants are central to two other books currently on my nightstand -- 22 BRITANNIA ROAD by Amanda Hodgkinson and THE VERY THOUGHT OF YOU by Rosie Alison. Isn't the world a funny place?!) In the case of BLIND FURY, Detective Inspector Anna Travis must consult with a convicted serial killer to determine who is responsible for a string of murders in which several of the victims are young Polish women. Oh, wait a minute! Our heroine has to rely on help from a convicted serial killer? Hasn't that already been done? Sure, but not like this. Although the actions of the murderous Cameron Welsh result in this being a pivotal novel in the series, he's no Hannibal Lector, so readers shouldn't assume that they've met this character before.Bottom line? I loved this book. I was completely engaged throughout -- 512 pages flew through my fingers. I like the flawed and damaged heroine, Anna Travis. I'm glad I can backtrack through the series and watch her make her way up through the ranks; and I'm really glad that the seventh book in the series, BLOODLINE, was recently released in the UK so I can find out where she's going!

[murdermysterymayhem · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Blind Fury, a British police procedural - cold cases, dead ends, bad relationships and a serial killer.A young women is found dead near a rest station on the M1, near London, and Inspector Anna Travis' case comes to a halt when the team are unable to identify the victim. The only thing Anna does know is that this murder appears to match the deaths of three other women found along that stretch of highway. Can these cold cases provide the clues to solve this murder? A lot of leg work and investigation of the cold case files slowly brings Anna closer to identifying her victim but not fast enough for her superiors and the press.DCI Langton, anxious to close the case, forces Travis to face a killer she's convicted on his home turf - the security block at Barfield prison. Cameron Welsh has finished a child psychology degree while inside and claims to be able to get into the mind of the killer. He should know, he is one. Travis is convinced that these trips provide nothing but sadistic pleasure to Welsh but as the visits turn personal much more may be at stake.

[kazimiera_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

i really enjoyed reading this book a must read for all fans of thrillers i just hope that lynda la plante writes a few more wiht anna travis as the main character

[austcrimefiction · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I've been happily reading the Anna Travis series by Lynda La Plante since the first book and enjoying them. Despite a few odds and ends that can be mildly annoying. Ongoing romantic angst, a tricky senior officer (in this case the early on love interest as well), and some seriously big books without always having quite enough story to fill out all of the pages. BLIND FURY, unfortunately, nearly defeated me before the end. Which is a pity. Because the investigative elements of this book are actually not too bad. It does take a while for things to get moving mind you - but it's an interesting sort of a case, with the bodies of two young unidentified girls and an identified older prostitute seemingly having little in common. Aside from the circumstances of the dumping of their corpses, and the way in which they were raped and killed. Identifying the victims requires a lot of good old fashioned police investigative work - a lot of which is done by the team that Anna is working with - with flashes of insight from Anna herself. At the same time, for reasons best known to DCS Langton, Anna and a colleague also find themselves visiting a maximum security jail to discuss the case with a previously convicted multiple murderer who claims he has a unique insight into the mindset of this new killer. Langton and Anna have a romantic history (they lived together at one point) and both have moved on. A while ago. It is mentioned, not quite as frequently as in earlier books, and it's sort of spiced up a little with some vaguely longing behaviour from Langton which seems to cause Anna to realise, frequently, that she's moved on. Moved on to the point where she forms a relationship with one of the guards on the unit where killer Cameron Welsh is held. And at this point the personal elements of the story start declaring themselves in bold face letters, with a little neon decoration for good measure.BLIND FURY heads off into unbelievable territory fairly quickly - with the unfathomable concentration on an unconnected, unqualified, convicted killer as some sort of "expert" witness in the case. Which didn't stack up well on it's own, let alone when you also have to accept some of the leaps of brilliance or "intuition" elements of the normal Anna investigation style. Normally this sort of thing is a little easier to swallow as previous books have belted along at a good pace, but this one dragged. As the focus is increasingly on Anna and her personal life, the concentration on the actual investigation wanes - and that got really annoying, as the process of identifying the two unknown girls, connecting them to the dead prostitute and then the painstaking work required to try to identify suspects was reasonably compelling. Or at least it felt so stacked up beside the inevitability of the trainwreck that is Anna's personal life. Overall there just wasn't enough of the good elements to hide or compensate for the increasingly sinking feeling of inevitability that hit as soon as a new man walked into Anna's life and the book dragged on to its foreseeable and really disappointing conclusion.

[birdsam0610 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I must say that I don’t take a lot of notice of the titles of Lynda La Plante’s DI Anna Travis novels, as I don’t think they usually relate to the actual novel. I suppose this book (the latest in the series) does, but you wouldn’t make the link until the end.This book is about another murder case that DI Travis is working on, the murder of three women whose bodies were all found just off a London motorway. It’s a dead case with very few leads. Enter a murderer in gaol who specifically states he can assist the case and get into the killer’s mind. An interesting plot line that makes you think of The Silence of the Lambs but it really doesn’t go very far, except for setting up another lover for Anna.I’m getting a bit sick of Anna and her boyfriends- yes, she’s very morally upright and dedicated to her career, so how does having a fling in each book assist the plot? Isn’t it in detective fiction canon that all detectives end up sad and lonely?This is a spoiler but Anna doesn’t break the mould. In what must be the most boring case covered in this series, leads continually come to dead ends and suspects / witnesses are revisited again and again. This is fiction- couldn’t there be a bit more liberty to make it interesting?The last couple of chapters go through emotions and timeframes very quickly- a little too quickly in my opinion. The blurb on the back of the book also says a little too much about what happens at the end- I had a chapter to read, read the blurb again and immediately thought, ‘Oh, I know what happens now’.Generally with this series I don’t expect high literature but gripping action. This time I didn’t even get one of them.